English colonists carried Magna Carta with them to North America, and the charter's ideas eventually spread far beyond the English-speaking world. In the process it became less a legal document than a symbol.

Rights of Englishmen

From the beginning, English colonial charters promised settlers the same liberties as people born in England. The Virginia charter of 1606, for example, declared that colonists would enjoy all the liberties, franchises and immunities of English subjects. Colonists took this seriously. In 1641 Massachusetts adopted a Body of Liberties, a list of rights that echoed Magna Carta's language about due process. Law books such as Coke's commentaries were widely read in the colonies, and many colonial lawyers learned their law from them.

Revolution

When Parliament began taxing the American colonies in the 1760s, colonists argued that it violated their rights as Englishmen. Their slogan, “no taxation without representation,” echoed the principle of the charter's clause 12 and the Petition of Right: taxes required the consent of those who paid them, and the colonists had no members in Parliament. Colonial writers cited Magna Carta in pamphlets and protests.

In 1775, as war began, the Massachusetts revolutionary government adopted a seal showing a man holding a sword in one hand and Magna Carta in the other. The rebels presented themselves not as breaking with English tradition but as defending it against a corrupt government.

The American Constitution

After independence, Americans wrote charter principles into their new constitutions. The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1791, declares that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” the phrase descended from the 1354 statute. The Constitution protects habeas corpus, forbids its suspension except in rebellion or invasion, and guarantees jury trial. After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) applied the due process requirement to the states as well.

Americans often revere Magna Carta more than the English do. In 1957 the American Bar Association built a memorial at Runnymede, and American courts cite the charter regularly. In Boumediene v. Bush (2008), the US Supreme Court, ruling that prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay could challenge their detention through habeas corpus, traced that right back through English history to Magna Carta.

The irony of slavery

The American story has a painful contradiction. The same founders who celebrated ancient liberties held hundreds of thousands of people in slavery, people to whom the charter's protections were not extended. Abolitionists pointed this out. Frederick Douglass, in his 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, condemned a nation that praised liberty while denying it to millions. Over time, the language of due process would be claimed by those whom the founders had excluded.

Copies far from home

The charter's prestige abroad shows in where its copies now rest. A 1297 copy issued by Edward I, one of only a handful still in existence, was bought in 2007 by the American businessman David Rubenstein and placed on display at the National Archives in Washington, next to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Another 1297 copy was bought by the Australian government in 1952 and is displayed in Parliament House in Canberra. For these countries, owning a copy was a way of claiming the charter's tradition as their own inheritance, not only Britain's.

Around the world

The charter's influence spread through the British Empire and beyond. Lawyers in India, Africa and elsewhere invoked it, sometimes against British rule itself. At his trial in 1964, facing a possible death sentence, Nelson Mandela told the court that he admired the British tradition of Magna Carta, the Petition of Right and the Bill of Rights, documents held in veneration by democrats throughout the world.

In December 1948, when the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the committee that drafted it, expressed the hope that it might become an international Magna Carta for all people everywhere. Its Article 9 forbids arbitrary arrest, detention or exile, and Article 10 guarantees a fair and public hearing by an independent tribunal, ideas that clause 39 first gestured toward.

Worked example: tracing a right

Follow one idea, protection against imprisonment without lawful process, through eight centuries.

• 1215: Clause 39. No free man to be imprisoned except by lawful judgment of his peers or the law of the land. Protects mainly barons.
• 1354: Statute extends it to any man of whatever estate and introduces “due process of law.”
• 1628 to 1679: Petition of Right and Habeas Corpus Act. Courts must be told the cause of imprisonment, and prisoners can demand a hearing.
• 1791: US Fifth Amendment. No person to be deprived of liberty without due process.
• 1948: UDHR Article 9. No one to be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
• 2008: Boumediene v. Bush. Even foreign detainees in a US military prison may challenge their detention in court.

At each step, the group protected grew, from barons to all free men, to all subjects, to all persons, to all human beings. The right never simply existed; people had to claim it again in each generation, often against those who preferred to keep it for themselves.